Char.gd

I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content coming out of most places, so I created one that focuses on technology and reducing noise on a weekly basis - about 7,000 subscribers now: http://char.gd

For a number of years, a lot of people have said that “newsletters are the new blogs” — and to a certain extent that’s true. During TinyLetter’s heyday, it was often easier for someone to create a newsletter and send it to people that wanted to read it than it is to setup a website and deal with what the entails (which sadly, in 2019 is more complicated than it was in 2006). But setting up a newsletter isn’t without its own costs and considerations. What platform do you use, how much does it cost to send emails (something that’s hard to ascertain if you don’t know how many subscribers you have), checking formatting for various mail clients and services, avoiding being marked as a spammer, etc. And that’s before you get into the aspect of creating the newsletter — which again, TinyLetter aside, is often difficult because most newsletter services are geared towards marketing/customer acquisition, rather than something akin to a blog. And if you want to charge for your newsletter, that’s another challenge. You have to figure out a payment processor, a membership signup system, deal with account issues, etc. For the Ben Thompsons’s of the world who were early/pioneered the game of paid subscription newsletters, the investment costs of infrastructure and technology is probably worth it. But for many others, it’s not. So Substack has the potential to be that defacto place/platform. I see it as trying to be the Blogger or WordPress.com for content-based newsletters,…

I haven't used this myself, but I have heard only great things about https://char.gd/recharged by @ow (twitter) - I'm sure you could reach out to him if you needed to ask about anything

Indeed. Other headlines from him are: - Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up - I got a Google Home and finally understand the future of computing - Apple just told the world it has no idea who the Mac is for - The reason I keep going back to Apple might surprise you - Google's software is putting Apple to shame - Google buying Twitter would be the best result for everyone - iOS 10: the beginning of the end for apps as you know them This is the profile of the newsletter editor (http://char.gd/announcements/welcome-to-the-new-charged/): Owen was previously Editor at The Next Web and now runs digital at VanMoof in Amsterdam. He created Charged newsletter, and is probably far too obsessed with keeping up with everything in tech.

twitter, seems to have a cowboy engineering culture. that's why one of their exec's blamed rails for their failure to combat harassment[0]. n I bet now, if they still ran rails, it would've been blamed lol. [0]: https://char.gd/recharged/daily/twitter-blames-ruby-on-rails-for-haras…

https://twitter.com/anoopr/status/1071921156687626240 > the game is background noise. Fortnite isn't a game, it's a place. https://char.gd/blog/2018/fortnite-is-the-new-hangout-spot > Fortnite is different, because it's not even about the game at all: it's a place we're all going together. > Not only is Fortnite the new hangout spot, replacing the mall, Starbucks or just loitering in the city, it's become the coveted 'third place' for millions of people around the world.

According to https://char.gd/blog/2017/wifi-has-been-broken-heres-the-companies-tha… it will be in the November 6 Android patch level.

Answering my own question: looks like someone is tracking it over here: https://char.gd/blog/2017/wifi-has-been-broken-heres-the-companies-tha… Microsoft's status is unclear at the time of writing.

You should be good if you’re up to date as of November 6th (I think, it may be November 8th) Swiftonsecurity tweeted this out, it’s a description of KRACK and various devices affected by it. Apparently google already fixed it on android? Also it says that iOS is rumored to be protected against this since iOS 11 but it’s not confirmed. Nobody has put out an official statement yet. What’s weird is that commercial vendors like Ubiquiti UniFi (I use them myself) have already released fixes for their APs but the paper says that clients should be the priority and get fixed from KRACK ASAP. And it’s weird because I don’t know of any client-side fix released in the wake of KRACK being public. https://char.gd/blog/2017/wifi-has-been-broken-heres-the-companies-tha…

Surface Pro range, Surface Book and Surface Studio are at the high end of the consumer market. They're all impressive (and expensive). Couple that with a backlash against Apple over the non-pro MacBook Pro, and its failure to update most other Macs. Then stir in articles like these: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up http://char.gd/microsoft/why-i-left-mac-for-windows/ Why I’m Leaving Apple for Microsoft: Switching as a Photographer https://petapixel.com/2016/12/03/im-leaving-apple-microsoft-switching-… and famously: Apple has lost the functional high ground https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground I don't want to overstate the case, but there's obviously been a shift over the past three or four years....

I went back to Winwdows after a long hiatus for my 'personal' laptop. The OS definitely doesn't have as much polish but I've been quietly impressed. I'm not a developer, but I am developer-adjacent, and I really struggled to get set up with WSL. Even using some guides like this: https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-dev-environ… I'll probably have to start it again from afresh, I just found setting up WSL unintuitive and the relationship between WSL and Windows confusing. I believe the situation was previously much worse so forward progress I suppose. Things I like about Windows: - Windows take up more space on the screen. When maximized, there's no title bar and sizing icons taking up space like on MacOS. For example, Chrome tabs are right up to the top of the screen without going full screen. - There's a program for everything. I've been able to play games I used to from 20 years ago and where they don't work out of the box (some do), someone has made a utility to make it all work. I'd forgotten the advantage of Windows having so many more users.

While I agree with the rest of your post I want to respond to this particular part of it: >I will happily give Google my location if it helps me avoid traffic jams, something many HN readers object to. The premise of this statement is that you have to give them this data to avoid traffic jams as part of an inherent bargain, but that's not the case. Yes at a very basic level maps apps need to access GPS to work, but the implementations matter. Apple Maps was specifically designed so that you can have those features in a privacy-preserving manner [1]: >“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.” >The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones. >Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent…

The minds that were behind LiveJournal, Friendster, and MySpace, to name just 3 other social platforms that had monthly active usership in the millions, were not as disgustingly criminal and unethical in nature as the mind of Zuckerberg, so, to answer your question, another online social platform could be more civil and nicer, and not as aggressive (with auto-playing, auto-looped videos, for one thing), and manipulative, and silo-creating in terms of the design and algorithms in the same way, and could be far less ruthlessly greedy, invasive, and devious toward its users in terms of the requiring, gathering, selling, and sharing of those users' data. An online social networking platform could even take a total different format than one that invites users to upload all their real personal life information and photos; there could be a platform as one where the users are playing ficitonalized characters in a make-believe world, and there isn't the same severe data-mining and harvesting of users' minds and lives, let alone with clear algorithmic and editorial favoring of political-themed content; I'm thinking first of something like the The Sims from 2000 to 2015[0], but there is a now a certain game that has become the de-facto social network of pre-teens to early teens, and that is Fortnite Battle Royale - see these 2 articles from December 2018[1]-[5]. Yes, there are other risks and dangers with such a platform (where gamification is taken to a much further extent: you're…

You should read this article about Fortnite: https://char.gd/blog/2018/fortnite-is-the-new-hangout-spot Apparently it's more of a "place" than a "game", so your kids are going to be left out if all of their friends are bonding and hanging out in the game. My parents never bought me a video game console, and I'm actually very grateful for that. I would play computer games occasionally but I was much more interested in learning QBASIC and making my own games, music, and animations. I also spent a lot of time outdoors with my friends and cousins, building treehouses and riding bikes, etc. Video game consoles weren't connected to the internet, and I was an only child, so I would have just been playing single-player games by myself. That would have been boring and a bit lonely, so maybe that's why I don't really like games. But it was always fun to go to a friend's house and play Super Smash Bros, GoldenEye 007, Crash Bandicoot, etc. I think you should reconsider the blanket ban on video games, because Minecraft and Fortnite can be very social activities. Maybe have a time limit of an hour per day.